Author's note: thank you very much for all the kind reviews! I think I may have fallen again into a slow start (I hope in time you'd all understand why so), but I'm improving now by keeping each chapter less than 2,000 words.

The Sun Sets From Where It Rose
Book I

.

Advent of Spring

.

Yamato could not remember how she managed to sneak in a stranger in her room. It was already noon when they reached her place; and he realized that the Tachikawa clan was no ordinary shizoku. The main house was protected within concrete walls, twenty feet tall. The lot was around ten hectares wide, with three gardens and a koi pond at the back. There were four gates, each guarded by two riflemen.

But the House of Tachikawa had a weak spot: the wall from the back was widest, and it was automatically the hardest for the riflemen to guard. Mimi, a surprisingly and conveniently abled climber, managed to loosen a plank of wood from the walls of the storage house, creating a passageway to the kitchen. 'I use this passageway whenever I want to go out at night,' Yamato remembered her saying.

This Tachikawa Mimi is no joke.

He reckoned that this shizoku has upgraded from the usual warrior-clan status to upscale family business. The abundance of imported goods and items were to prove that.

Speaking of items, almost every fixture he saw bore the family crest; either emblazoned with Arabic gold or carved in native cypress. Her room was fragranced with jasmine and citrus, hiding the bitter scent of smoke, gunpowder, and old blood which stuck to every inch of the household.

The scent, however, did not escape his nose. He sat back on to Mimi's bed, unable to handle his nausea. Her bed happened to be the only untainted item around.

"I need to go, Mimi." He told her. She had already changed from her dirty yukata to a cleaner one.

"Are you sure you don't want to stay in?" offered Mimi, who was already packing her essentials in a small canvas bag. She walked towards him and sat on his lap, held him by the shoulders. "Who's so important that you have to go now?"

He gave her a crooked smile, already figuring out her intentions. "I must say, Tachikawa, you are very daring."

"Yamato-san," she said, spreading her legs in between his lap. "You'd have to be an idiot to not know that I like you."

"No, I have already figured that out earlier."

She leaned in to capture his lips again, a slow start to a marathon. He was pushed down to her sheets, her body hungry for skin. There's a difference between love and lust – and he thought Mimi cannot distinguish both.

But that is not to say he wouldn't entertain her appetite. Her passion was unlike any of a mere mortal's soul; there's so much that it levels with his own.

Spirits must not fall in love, and Yamato knew that very well. He had learned his lesson the hard way. For if he did, he'd lose the very purpose of his existence.

But with hands and lips all over her flesh, his heart fleeting while hers pounded in irregularity, with the notion that human souls cannot walk freely within the world of dreams and reality, he began to question his beliefs and his being. There was nothing mere or ordinary about Tachikawa Mimi, despite being very, very, human.

"What are you thinking?" he whispered in between their lips as she's yet again attempting to take off his robe. His hands slipped between her ribbons and sashes, undoing her as well as he craved for her bare skin. He did so until she was wearing nothing but him.

He traded places, this time pinning her down as he relished her from the valleys of her breasts, to the plains of her navel, finally to her cave. Like earlier, there were no regrets or second thoughts despite the remaining innocence in her eyes. She welcomed him and his warmth, her hands tracing every muscle and sinew in him.

It was happening again for the second time. The second time was much longer.

"I don't know about you," she breathed as she broke their kiss, pushing him away gently. "But I feel that you're not from around here."

"I am not from around here," he emphasized, brushing some of her hair that stuck to her mouth.

"No," there was something definitely different with him. It wasn't just the way he looked, but the way she felt him; the warmth of his skin and his heartbeat was unnatural, his movements were faint, slow but perfect and accurate. Subtle but intense, as she would put it, but is there even such a thing that coexists? "I feel that you're not real."

He pulled away from her as he dressed himself quietly. He watched her do the same. His very blue eyes lingered between life and death. She wondered if there was such a place.

"What do you mean I'm not real, Mimi?" he smirked as he reached out to touch her face.

She held his hand and pressed it firmly against her cheek. His hand was smooth, unnatural for a fighter as the scars on his chest suggested. "You're not a slave. You're not a worker. Not even a soldier. I can tell."

"I'm neither," he admitted.

"The fabric of your yukata is too light, even your hakama. It's not even made out of rinzu. You can't be a businessman or an heir. Or of higher ranking," she continued to voice her observations. She had enough encounters among different classes to know the difference.

"Well that will leave a bruise," he laughed. "but yes, you're right as well."

"Then what are you?" she asked. "Are you a stowaway?"

"What am I, you asked," His fingers continued to brush against her cheek. "I'd let you know, but then I'd have to kill you."

Mimi went silent not out of fear, but of her stubborn curiosity. There are many more questions running in her head, but she chose to stop. He pulled away from her, laughed at her expression. He stood up from her bed, with a courteous smile. It was already the afternoon.

"Well, Mimi. I guess this is farewell. You're a very radical miss. Izumi-san is a lucky guy," he bid, slightly sad that this was all there is to it. "I bet you don't want to be my bride now, huh?"

"Nothing of what you've been saying scares me off, to be honest," she spoke. "And no, I still want you, stranger, to be my companion. You said you'll get me out of here. You promised!"

The spoiled brat awakens, he noted as she relentlessly tugged his non-rinzu sleeve. "Why do you want to run away so much? As far as I can tell, you're not really a prisoner in here," he asked as he looked around her room again.

"I don't want to get married," she stressed. "That is just unfair,"

"You live off with your family's wealth and status. You are luckier than the most, Mimi," he answered bitterly. He had walked through the earth for so long to gain that understanding. Nothing is unfair. It was just divine retribution. "Getting hitched is how you at least pay your dues and respect your clan's 'wishes'."

And he was right, she realized. She was aware that she shared the same suffering among the women in the court, but they only did so in silence and gossip. Can I really survive out there, she wondered as she remembered she could not even survive under the rain. Her family never asked her for anything, and had always given what she wanted – from imported chocolates to expensive trips to Europe – all they required was her participation to an arranged marriage that has been settled by her grandfather years ago. To secure the future of warrior clans, she remembered his oji-san saying. Yet, despite realizing her selfishness, she could only weep for her heart could still not accept it.

Yamato could only watch her small shoulders heave up and down. She cried like a child, and he felt the naivety and sincerity of her tears. She grieved at the very thought of staying here, and he could tell it was purely out of her heart.

"Whenever forbidden lovers elope, they end up in a life of suffering," he said. "Are you so sure you want to endanger your future for someone who doesn't even mean anything to you?"

"Is it premature and naïve of me to say," she looked up to him as she wiped her tears. "that the storm in my heart has never calmed since the rain.."

And it was true that the storm in his never did, too. He folded his arms across his chest, with a coy but taunting grin. "Well, aren't you a wordsmith."

However, she was in no position for lithe humor. Her next words pierced through his heart. "Yamato-san, do you feel the same way?"

He wondered for a while if this was destiny's doing; if they were really meant to feel this way, out of spontaneity and rationale. It was just that he could not grasp how seemingly ill their future together. But he was just a spirit – not a god, an angel or the devil even – nothing more but an okami, guised as human. He had no power to change the course of their fate.

"I would be a traitor to my heart to say otherwise." he replied. "but it's clear that we are not meant to be."

She glared at him. "You don't even know that."

"You are a stubborn one, are you?"

"Just insistent."

"You are. You have my feet stuck to wherever you are."

"So.. are you telling me you really want to leave?"

"I would have already done so if I did," he said as he sat back next to her. He looked straight at her eyes, and he was unable to withhold his smile. He cupped her face and wiped her cheeks. "And you cried."

"I'm sorry."

"Ahh. But I really need to go, Mimi."

"Are you going to come back?"

Yamato brushed his hand over her cheek, before looking outside. He saw that it was nearing twilight, and the buds of cherry blossoms finally turned pink. "The first flower, right?"

With head over heels, they had fallen. There was no viable reason why they did. They just did.